Free The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw

horoscope and even every word puzzle made her question who she was,
confused under the weight of all the people it was possible to be. One mid-summer Monday afternoon she broke down in the office. She found it hard to even work out her notice period.
    The job Kenneth had helped her find was exactly the sort of thing she needed. Something to forget about come five o’clock. It was only a short walk to the offices, which stood at the end
of a dusty street running west from Saint Erasmus. They rose in a grand old heap of tanned stone, with whiskery grasses poking out of their walls, and culminated in a clock tower that unified the
ramshackle wings and annexes beneath, but in which the hands of the clock had frozen long ago. Craning her neck and shielding the climbing sun from her eyes, she could just make out a wooden figure
on either side of the face, attached to some kind of clockwork track. The first, a man with a rough beard and broad brimmed hat, a pickaxe held in one hand and in the other a hand bell, thrusting
it out into the open air. The second wore black and leaned on a scythe.
    Lily, Elsa’s new supervisor, met her in a reception hall panelled with dark wood and hung with row after row of trophy goat heads. Lily was nineteen years old and her jaw wagged when she
spoke, as if the things she said were chewing gum. She led the way up a flight of wooden steps that tapped under their heels with hollow echoes, to an office with a small desk allotted to Elsa.
    Elsa spent most of the day at an ancient photocopier. There the hours passed so slowly that they seemed measured by the broken clock.
    ‘So what in the world,’ asked Lily when lunchtime at last arrived, ‘possessed you to move here from New York?’
    Lily made it sound so ridiculous that Elsa hesitated. Kenneth had treated her decision with something like reverence, so it surprised her to hear someone question it. But in this shabby office
it did indeed seem ridiculous.
    ‘I ...’ she said, ‘I ...’ She was damned if she would belittle herself; Lily could think she was nuts if she wanted to. ‘I did it to try to get my head straight. In
New York my life just ... accumulated. I didn’t feel like I’d chosen any of it, only wandered into it and just started living it. Then earlier this year some stuff happened and it made
me realize that I needed to live a life I had chosen, to be a person I had considered being. So I came here, I suppose, to have the space to find that version of myself.’
    Lily looked at her like she thought she was nuts.
    When she stepped out of the offices at the end of the day, the shadow of the clock tower lay across the street. She wandered wearily into Saint Erasmus Square to sit on one of the wooden benches
that faced the church. The evening heat was stirred with dust that blurred the details from the rooftops and made the sky look used and flat.
    She was exhausted, tempted to lie down right there in the square and sleep, but she was determined to make something from the evening that was emerging, blown full of the scent of wood fires.
She got up and walked until she discovered a bar called the Brook Horse, which spanned five storeys. It had a glorious, hand-painted sign hanging above the entrance, in which a horse swam
underwater, its mane flowing behind it. A grid of eggshell cracks had split the paint, but the deep teal of the water remained vivid. The horse in the sign was no ordinary equine. Instead of hind
legs its body streamlined into that of a fish, its tail fanning out gracefully to propel it through the currents.
    Each floor of the bar was a cubbyhole joined to the others by a rickety spiral staircase. A group of girls who would never have been served in the States nursed pots of a sticky-looking beer on
the ground floor, while on the next a woman in a raggedy shawl sewed behind a bottle of wine. The top storey overflowed on to a lop-sided balcony where Elsa sat to watch the heat haze sandpapering
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